** The Carians or Cretans are again referred to in the
history of Athaliah (2 Kings xi. 4).

*** Taking the tribute paid by Menahem to Pul (2 Kings xv.
19, 20) as a basis, it has been estimated that the owners of
landed estate in Israel, who were in that capacity liable to
render military service, numbered 60,000 in the time of that
king; all others were exempt from military service.

The reigning prince was hereditary commander-in-chief, but the
_sharzaba_, or captain of the troops, often took his place, as in the
time of David, and thereby became the most important person in the
kingdom. More than one of these officers had already turned against
their sovereign the forces which he had entrusted, to them, and these
revolts, when crowned with success, had, on various occasions, in Israel
at any rate, led to a change of dynasty: Omri had been shar zaba when he
mutinied against Zimri, the assassin of Elah, and Jehu occupied the same
position when Elisha deputed him to destroy the house of Omri.

The political constitutions of Judah and Israel were, on the whole, very
similar to those of the numerous states which shared the territory of
Syria between them, and their domestic history gives us a fairly exact
idea of the revolutions which agitated Damascus, Hamath, Carchemish,
Arpad, and the principalities of Amanos and Lebanon about the same
period. It would seem, however, that none of these other nations
possessed a literary or religious life of any great intensity. They had
their archives, it is true, in which were accumulated documents relating
to their past history, their rituals of theology and religious worship,
their collections of hymns and national songs; but none of these have
survived, and the very few inscriptions that have come down to us merely
show that they had nearly all of them adopted the alphabet invented
by the Phoenicians. The Israelites, initiated by them into the art of
writing, lost no time in setting down, in their turn, all they could
recall of the destinies of their race from the creation of the world
down to the time in which they lived. From the beginning of the
monarchical epoch onwards, their scribes collected together in the _Book
of the Wars of the Lord_, the _Book of Jashar_, and in other works the
titles of which have not survived, lyrics of different dates, in which
nameless poets had sung the victories and glorious deeds of their
national heroes,